Volume 597 Issue 7876, 16 September 2021

The departing German chancellor’s support for science and rigour in policymaking has proved transformative — except on climate change.

Data should be a means to knowledge, not an end in themselves.

Exposure to digestive fluids triggers the deployment of a needle through which medication flows into the stomach tissue.

Algorithm can pick out hospitalized people who are most likely to spread drug-resistant microbes.

A cloud of rubidium atoms is said to have achieved the coldest temperature yet after being dropped from the top of a tower.

With climate change fracturing northern ice, the bears have begun to lose genetic diversity.

People in one Indian state flooded into the streets and onto a seismology app after predictions of a quake that never happened.

Analysis of mysterious earth mounds reveals their rapid construction and sophisticated composition.

A soft material can be guided to rapidly assume the same colour pattern as its background.

The latest science news, in brief.

If China’s experimental reactor is a success it could lead to commercialization and help the nation meet its climate goals.

The category-4 storm is the latest in a line of tropical cyclones that have closed universities, caused scientists to evacuate and disrupted research projects.

The pandemic’s effects on efforts to thwart other infectious diseases could exceed the direct impact of COVID-19.

Environmental network calls for delay to the November meeting, but many developing countries and the host nation vow to press on in face of climate threats.

Modelling suggests that many planned coal, oil and gas extraction projects will not be viable if the world hopes to achieve climate targets.

NASA’s Perseverance rover lives up to its name, drilling and storing Martian rock after a misstep in August.

Hundreds of scientists had worked on mRNA vaccines for decades before the coronavirus pandemic brought a breakthrough.

As humans encroach on the habitat of wild animals, is it any surprise that they advance upon ours?

Nobel-winning biochemist who discovered a ubiquitous cell-regulatory mechanism.

Make science more reliable by placing the burden of replicability on the community, not on individual laboratories.

Historically Black colleges and universities offer personal and professional support that predominantly white US institutions do not.

Morexa Martin-Gardiner relishes the seasonal shifts of her work on a sugar-cane research station in Barbados.

Layered perovskites are useful materials that contain sheets of a perovskite semiconductor enclosed by organic molecules. Crystals of layered perovskites that include sheets of a second inorganic lattice can now be grown from solution.

Cells continually acquire mutations and pass them on to their progeny. The mutation profiles of human cells shine a light on the cells’ developmental history and their dynamics in adult tissue.

A field trial shows that text-message ‘nudges’ encourage people to get vaccinated against COVID-19. To be effective, nudge approaches such as this must combine three aspects: they must prompt, enable and motivate behaviour.

Nature’s pages feature a look at psychology in industrial workplaces, and a mystery surrounding fish in a Swiss lake.

The Arabian Peninsula was a key migratory crossroads when humans and our hominin relatives began to leave Africa. Archaeological evidence and climate reconstructions reveal episodes when early humans inhabited Arabia.

The diffuse, isotropic background of gamma rays comes mainly from star-forming galaxies, according to a physical model of gamma-ray emission.

Metal-to-insulator transitions are characterized in twisted WSe, revealing strange metal behaviour and quantum criticality at low temperatures.

The interaction strength in moiré superlattices is tuned to drive a continuous metal-to-insulator transition at a fixed electron density.

Using organic molecules as directing groups, a wide range of perovskite heterostructures are shown to self-assemble in solution to yield single crystals.

A range of environmental stressors are estimated for farmed and wild capture blue foods, including bivalves, seaweed, crustaceans and finfish, with the potential to inform more sustainable diets.

The amount of carbon dioxide released by the Australian wildfires of 2019–2020 is uncertain, but is estimated here using satellite observations of carbon monoxide to be more than twice the amount suggested by fire inventories.

Oceanic deposition of wildfire aerosols can enhance marine productivity, as supported here by satellite and in situ profiling floats data showing that emissions from the 2019–2020 Australian wildfires fuelled phytoplankton blooms in the Southern Ocean.

Dated palaeolake sequences show that there were at least five Pleistocene hominin expansions into the Arabian interior, coinciding with windows of reduced aridity between 400 and 55 thousand years ago.

The authors report the mutational landscape of 29 cell types from microdissected biopsies from 19 organs and explore the mechanisms underlying mutation rates in normal tissues.

Somatic mutations obtained from laser microdissected biopsies of human tissues are used to reconstruct the developmental phylogenies of these tissues back to the zygote.

Adult human tissues from diverse sites around the body are used to reconstruct cellular phylogenies from early development, using somatic mutations as an internal barcode.

Laser-capture microdissection and mini-bulk exome sequencing are combined to analyse somatic mutations in morphologically normal tissues from nine organs from five donors, revealing variation in mutation burdens, mutational signatures and clonal expansions.

Two randomized controlled trials demonstrate the ability of text-based behavioural ‘nudges’ to improve the uptake of COVID-19 vaccines, especially when designed to make participants feel ownership over their vaccine dose.

Signals from the sympathetic nervous system act via mesenchymal stromal cells to regulate the function of group 2 innate lymphoid cells and control adipocyte metabolism.

AIM2 responds to infection with herpes simplex virus 1 or Francisella novicida by driving assembly of a large multi-protein complex containing multiple inflammasome sensors and cell death regulators.

¹⁸O₂ labelling is used to identify metabolites in human cells that incorporate gaseous oxygen, including 4-hydroxymandelate, an intermediate in the synthesis of the coenzyme Q10 head group.

Observations of rapid repair of double-stranded DNA breaks in sister choromosomes in Escherichia coli are consistent with a reduced-dimensionality-search model of RecA-mediated repair.

Structural, functional and localization studies reveal that Geobacter sulfurreducens pili cannot behave as microbial nanowires, instead functioning in a similar way to secretion pseudopili to export cytochrome nanowires that are essential for extracellular electron transfer.